Lovelorn, Childhood, Returning
by Crookshanks22
Summary: Two short sketches of Minerva McGonagall's private life and her close, but not romantic, relationship with Albus Dumbledore. Some aspects of the story are AU in light of the new Dumbledore timeline. Abandoned for now.
1. Lovelorn

Author note: I find the Albus-Minerva ship almost as bizarre as Severus-Hermione, Draco-Ginny, or Harry-Justin (don't ask!). In writing this story, I aimed to give readers a realistic perspective on this significant, but not necessarily romantic, ship.

J.K. Rowling once stated (in 2000, after the publication of _Goblet of Fire_) that Minerva McGonagall was "a sprightly seventy." The HP Lexicon takes that to mean that Minerva was 70 at the end of_ GoF_, and consequently gives her birth date as c. 1925. I suspect that Rowling actually meant that Minerva was 70 at the beginning of the series, thus giving a birth date of either October 4, 1920 or October 4, 1921. (Explanation of my reasoning available upon request!) In this story, I have used that dating and have assumed that Minerva was at Hogwarts in 1932-39 or 1933-40.

* * *

**Lovelorn**

The children have dirty minds, they really do, almost without exception.

They arrive pure and childish, most of them anyway, the most sheltered ones still ignorant of the facts of life, and they spend the first two years growing into hooliganism. The boys shoot up in spurts as rapid as if induced by Skele-Gro and get bad haircuts, of which they're inordinately proud, and the girls sprout breasts and lacquer their nails, and then they start the rumors.

Hooch is a lesbian, the fourth-years tell the third-years. (That's true, actually—although the part about her abortive elopement with the sixteen-year-old Seeker of the Ravenclaw Quidditch team is not.) Irma Pince lusts after Argus Filch. (All right, the children may have something there. She has wondered. Suffice it to say, she has wondered.) Flitwick frequents gay bars. (Where did that one come from? Do they assume that every short man is gay?) Snape has a secret wife, who is either a Muggle, or dead (he murdered her), or living in Iona, and he's got a secret daughter, too, who is the most powerful witch of her generation but totally uneducated because her father can't stand the sight of her and won't let her come to Hogwarts. (There are so many holes in that one that Minerva can't help but laugh. If the children only knew.) Hagrid practices bestiality, and he's partial to unicorns. (Some not-so-subtle homosexual allusions there, she thinks . . . how disappointed the children must have been when he met Olympe Maxime.) And the headmaster, well, the headmaster is having a raging affair with old McGonagall.

It's a compliment, she supposes. She tries to see it as a compliment. That they think she's still young enough, still attractive enough, for that sort of thing and that they pair her with someone they like. After all, they could have paired her name with Filch's, or with Snape's . . . which wouldn't be any more absurd. Severus Snape is forty years nearer her age than Albus Dumbledore.

Albus is a good friend, and a good man too, and she's fond of him, very fond. But being a grown woman does not suffice to make one lust after a man old enough to be one's grandfather. She looks at the children giggling in Transfiguration, whispering, passing notes, and she sees herself front left, just where Hermione Granger usually sits, her left elbow cupped over the edge of her notebook, quill working furiously under a curtain of brown hair. For she was thirteen once too, perky and restless and emotional, and much given to drawing hippogriffs in her notebook and reading library books under her arm in History of Magic, and Arithmancy, and Muggle Studies, and, well, most of her classes really, always excepting Transfiguration, because that was complex and dangerous magic, not the kind one could do with one's mind on one's dinner, and the new (though even then not exactly young) professor of Transfiguration was a fascinating, brilliant, and much-traveled wizard named Albus Dumbledore.

In those days his hair was auburn, and his robes were starched, and his beard didn't look like birds could nest in it. He was a marvelous teacher, perceptive, witty, discreet, with a cache of Acid Pops in his desk that students were allowed to eat once they had turned them into Ice Mice and back again. As the third-years licked their Acid Pops, Professor Dumbledore entertained them with tales of his alchemical research and with daring feats of transfiguration. The classroom became a forest glade and then a Muggle leisure park and then the same classroom 200 years before, as the students sat mesmerized in their seats, squinting at their limbs as if uncertain they were yet themselves. Professor Dumbledore delighted in doing things they had never seen before, even as he lectured them on the proper boundaries of magic. His eyes twinkled blue behind his spectacles, and he was known to have a scar in the shape of the London Underground above his knee, which had been the source of much speculation. Though his deportment was resolutely avuncular, the fascination he roused—not least in Minerva—was something more than filial. It swelled into passionate, fervid devotion.

She did not, however, wish to sleep with him. Indeed, the thought never crossed her mind—thank goodness!— until she came back to Hogwarts, some years after the Grindelwald War, and the children saw their friendship and started giggling.

Oh, the children.

Well, she had a boyfriend once at Hogwarts, when she was a fourth-year. He was the Keeper of the Gryffindor Quidditch team, and a good one too. She didn't sleep with him, because she was fifteen and she hadn't gotten around to wanting to sleep with boys yet, because all in all, truth be told, she was really more interested in Transfiguration and Potions then, but still she had a boyfriend for the duration of one full term, and things went rather farther than they should have, before she realized (thanks to a short but intriguing unit in Muggle Studies) that her I.Q. probably exceeded his by some thirty points or so, and her interest waned. It was the 1930s then, and eugenics had not yet been discredited. Keeper boy faded amiably into the distance as Minerva retreated to the back corner of the library to read the works of Sir Francis Galton, Lewis Terman, and Alfred Binet.

No one reads them now. They read the Kinsey Report instead. Yes, even Hermione Granger.

Minerva can't speak for Muggles, much less American Muggles, but she can speak confidently for the wizards of Britain. On the whole, there's less sex, and certainly less impulsive extramarital sex, in adult life than most thirteen-year-olds would believe. You can't tell them. She has tried.

There are also more essays to grade than any thirteen-year-old anticipates. Essays to grade, and Mandrakes to repot, and Flobberworms to sort, and detentions to supervise. That's what takes up the time meant for sex, or the time so designated in the ribald minds of thirteen-year-olds.

Well, fantasies are healthy. Let them have their fantasies.

Even as a young woman, fresh from Hogwarts, Minerva feared that celibacy would be her lot, for long stretches of her life if not forever—deserts of years. Even amid the tantalizingly violent roller coaster of excitement that was the Grindelwald War, the night flights and the swing bands and the stopovers in foreign ports, the moments of thinking, "He—" and "He—," she feared that none of her short consuming romances would survive the war. What men felt for her was friendship or passion or both, but never love.

No one ever proposed.

So she came back to Hogwarts, and she took Albus's place when he took Armando Dippet's, and it's been a good life on the whole, but not complete. In some ways she still feels twenty-two. It isn't so much the lack of sex she minds—occasional dark nights aside—as the lack of home and husband, the never coming first with anyone. She feels it more starkly now that her siblings are gone from her life, now that her parents are dead. Instead of a home, she has a castle; students instead of children; a cat life instead of a sex life; and in place of a husband, she has a mentor, a boss, well-loved, kindly, decent, and good, but a boss all the same, a mentor, not a peer, Albus Dumbledore.

Yes, she has pined, but not for him. And not for rugged old Mad-Eye, either, whatever the children say. She has pined for the man she never met, and the children she now knows she will not have. She has pined for the years the Time-Turner will not give back, and for a life in which she might have been Minerva first and last, instead living all her warmest, wisest, lovingest moments as Professor McGonagall.


	2. Childhood

**Childhood**

In Christchurch the leaves are falling, and the white-throated tuis chuckle in the wilting rosebushes, when the Great Auk takes flight. Winging high above New Zealand's alpine glaciers; west across Australia's native beaches; island-hopping in the Indian Ocean, as the crews of tankers and pirate ships squint heavenward; a night in Madagascar and another amid the flamingos of Lake Victoria; skirting the High Atlas to loll exhausted on the volcanic Canaries. A score of nights, all told, west and north and west again, always with the waterproofed, invisible parchment chained to its foot, until at last, summoning its final ounce of strength, the great bird bursts like revelation on a radiant, heather-ridden Highland spring.

In a regal turret of Gryffindor Tower, Minerva gently dislodges the parchment and pours a nip of Highland whiskey for the Auk. She turns the small packet over and over, thoughtful, resigned. Good or bad or merely strange, the contents can bring nothing but heartache. She pours a nip of Highland whiskey for herself and breaks the seal.

It's a long and newsy letter from an old friend, a Jill-of-all-trades who teaches flying and commentates on Quidditch in Moutohora and Woollongong. It's family news, mostly; Minerva's family, not Jill's. Howard may have to retire from his mind-numbingly dull position in the Oceania Joint Patent Authority; the self-operating vacuum cleaners (not as safe as they sound) have clobbered him one time too many. Sandy's wife Melania, who's forty-seven, has just announced a pregnancy, to the chagrin of her teenaged children; "I think they're using Muggle technology," Jill hints darkly, "Hope the Healers at St. Botolph's don't find out." Cuthbert, who graduated from the Tasmanian Academy of Magic last December, has been taken on by the Moutohora Macaws. Jill encloses a clipping from the local wizarding newspaper.

Minerva scrutinizes the animated photograph: the jolly faces of the nephews she has never met; their wives, these many years now; their almost grown-up children. She gazes into the flabby, wrinkled face of the brother-in-law of whom, even in his youth, she thought so little, and then at last into the pensive concealing face, the sad autumnal beauty, of Persephone.

Thirty-nine years and thirty-nine letters; three successive Great Auks. They were born here, near Inverness, just seventeen months apart. They passed their schooldays here, in Gryffindor Tower. They were best friends for twenty years, from the time they were toddlers in matching dresses, restraining squirming kittens on the floor of a modest Highland bothy, until they went, both of them, expert fliers that they were, as soldiers in the gruesome war against Grindelwald. They haven't spoken in forty years, but she can't forget she has a sister.

Dad was a Muggle-born wizard whose goal in life was to raise a genius. His grandparents sprang from the slums of Govan, refugees of the Highland clearances. By dint of hard travail, his grandfather rose to become a factory foreman, and his father, a butcher. Recklessly ambitious in a bloody-cuffed, working-class, Clydeside manner, Jock McGonagall refused to release his clever son from primary school to pursue his wizarding education. At thirteen the boy ran away; he commenced his Hogwarts schooling two years late. He broke every tie with the family of his birth. He never once looked back.

Mum was one of the Glasgow Macmillans, pureblood of course, but that's not the sort of pure blood that most wizards would choose to brag about. Macmillans are rigidly virtuous and wholesomely dull, and they're usually happiest when they marry each other. Certainly, marrying a mudblood McGonagall had turned out to be a mistake for Julie Macmillan. The children were her only consolation, and sometimes a poor one at that.

Impish young Alexander was a severe disappointment to John McGonagall, as he said frequently in his son's absence, and also in his presence. It was left to the daughters to carry the mantle of Dad's ambition; but Persephone, bright and rebellious, would not submit. She learned the art of self-sabotage early, failing exams and racking up detentions simply in order to make her father heel. And so it fell to Minerva, the eldest and unwilling favorite, to make the goals, to win the prizes, to get her name in the newspapers—and to sweep up the littered fragments of human relationships when she got home.

It wasn't so bad at first—for at first, you see, she had a sister. Six years together at Hogwarts, one year apart after she left school—just long enough to whet her appetite for companionship again—and then the rush of wartime missions, of hectic nights and clouded days. They were a team in the Grindelwald War, a bit of a legend, like Black and Lupin in later days; not quite as reckless, but something of a legend all the same, the flying sisters, clever, fleet, and female. She wanted nothing more than to be Persephone's partner, Dumbledore's ace lieutenant . . . until her sister dropped the bomb, as the Muggle saying goes.

In the midst of the Grindelwald War, without notice, without warning, Persephone abruptly married a dumpy New Zealander whose chief attraction, as far as Minerva could tell, was that he wished to live in New Zealand.

"Don't do it, Persephone."

"I already did."

"You don't love him."

She spread her arms. "What's love? Love is a word. What matters is intention."

"The war's almost over. You're giving up so much for so little."

"I'm getting out of Scotland."

"But Persephone, you don't _need_ to. They won't expect us to move home again. Not at our age."

Persephone rolled her eyes. "I'm sick to death of this place. I'd move to the Moon if I could."

Instead she moved to Woollongong. Then Moutohora for a year, and finally the Christchurch garden suburbs. Persephone, a housewife. They corresponded for a while, until Persephone stopped writing back. Was she too happy to need a sister anymore? Was she so chagrined by the choice she'd made that she couldn't bear to write? Minerva stopped writing; it was the most dignified thing to do. And she set an old friend to spy on her sister. Because love matters more than dignity, at least in private.

Would it ruin her mystique at Hogwarts, if the pupils knew she had a sister?

Alexander missed the Grindelwald War, ensconced with the underage at Hogwarts for the duration. In the brave new post-war world, he proved a poor substitute for Persephone. There was no heart-to-heart conversation, no companionship of equals, no steadying influence of an alternative value system to Dad's. There was just the patient, unheeded refrain, punctuating the covered-up hearings at the Ministry and the urgent late-night Floos: "Don't play Quidditch when you've been drinking."

"I only had four or five. I think . . ."

"You don't remember how many Fire-Whiskies you had?"

He twitched his nose. "Igor cleared away some of the glasses. I slept at the pub last night—didn't quite make it home . . ."

Couldn't stand up, she thought.

Ten years of that, as she bobbed and parried the blows of the rugged post-war world and found her way back to Hogwarts. Twenty years, as her hopes of marriage and children withered on the vine. Twenty-two years. Twenty-four. What would you do? She was the one who brought him into the Order when the "First" War started, and she was, she supposes, indirectly responsible for his throwing his life away. A man who plays Quidditch while incapacitated is a man who will fly missions while incapacitated, as any big sister knows. And Alexander, like Persephone, had learned the art of self-sabotage early, though without the same finesse. Was it suicide, she wonders still, or just a love of danger? Did he realize how pointless the mission was, or was he drunk on the rhetoric of Mad-Eye Moody? Alastor's enthusiasm killed a lot of young men, most of them more to be regretted than Alexander.

She used to think her past was complicated, tragic. But with age one gains the critical distance to call a spade a spade. Dad was a tyrant; Mum was a cipher. Alexander, by seventeen, was a raging drunk. Persephone was the rebel who stood on a chair and said loudly and clearly that this was wrong, that this was not what a family ought to be, and afterwards escaped to New Zealand. And Minerva was the good girl who stayed at home to tolerate Mum's passivity and her father's wrath, to nurse the depressed and wayward Alexander through his drunken sprees, to emerge as the well-respected but not-quite-genius daughter of an embittered and never-quite-satisfied father, to bear alone the burden of that modest Highland bothy.

When the war ends, she'll take a leave of absence. She will go to Oceania, to Moutohora and Woollongong. She will go to Van Diemen's Land. When the war ends, she thinks, not now; when the war ends, which can't be soon.

Albus would let her go tomorrow if she asked. He's one of the few who knows.

* * *

Author note: In the Muggle world, Great Auks are (a) flightless; and (b) extinct. Still, I imagine Dumbledore may have some stashed away somewhere . . . one couldn't reasonably expect a three-pound barn owl to work the New Zealand-Scotland route.


End file.
